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Sabtu, 22 September 2012
NY - State Supreme Court Dismisses Town's Sex Offender Trailer Lawsuit
09/21/2012
By Lisa Finn
The long-simmering controversy surrounding two homeless sex offender trailers sited in Riverside and Westhampton ignited again on Friday.
The Southampton Town Board expressed outrage after news that the appellate division, second department of the New York State Supreme Court overturned a Suffolk County Supreme Court judge's decision — and dismissed the town's lawsuit against Suffolk County regarding the use and placement of the trailers.
The appellate division, in a unanimous decision, ruled that Southampton Town had only four months from the initial installation of each of the trailers to file the lawsuit.
For years, town residents have rallied to voice their anger at what they say is an unfair burden, housing the majority of the county's sex offenders at the two locations, at the Suffolk County Correctional Facility parking lot in Riverside and a Suffolk County police parcel in Westhampton.
Suffolk County Legislators Jay Schneiderman and Ed Romaine have long worked to resolve the situation and relieve constituents of what they say is an unfair burden.
The decision to dismiss the lawsuit comes only months after County Executive Steve Bellone held a press conference and promised a solution to the situation was on the horizon.
"Just a few months ago, the County Executive himself clearly stated his agreement that the current homeless sex offender trailer housing system is unfair and illogical, yet the court failed to examine the compelling merits of the case, and instead, based its decision on a poorly applied technicality," Southampton Town Supervisor Anna Throne-Holst said. "My priority is to ensure the trailers are removed from their current locations. The town will continue to litigate as needed, but I sincerely hope the county will bring this relief first — and soon."
Southampton Town Councilwoman Christine Scalera said the bulk of sex offenders are housed in the trailers, no matter where they originally come from. "It is a county-wide problem that our residents should not bear alone. The town is now in the unenviable position that to preserve its rights, litigation must continue. It is unfair, it is unreasonable and it needs to be stopped now,” she said.
According to the Southampton town attorney's office, the goal of the lawsuit was to seek injunctive relief and prohibit violations of its local building and zoning codes by the use and installation of the trailers.
The appellate division, however, ruled that the case must be interpreted as an Article 78, a proceeding used to appeal a court's decision, or, in that instance, to challenge the county's determination to site the trailers — and said, as an Article 78, the minimum statute of four months to file applied. The town's lawsuit hit a roadblock because it was brought two years after the trailers were set up.
The town attorney's office and the Town Board have long said that when the trailers were initially set up, it was with the understanding that the placement was meant to be temporary — and that the location of the trailers would be rotated throughout the county; when the Town Board learned of actions to make the locations more permanent, action was commenced to pursue litigation, Town Board members say, within 24 hours.
“The County Executive came to Southampton in May of this year and pronounced that the county was moving to implement a new plan that included dispersing the population of homeless sex offenders to more fairly distribute the burden," Councilman Chris Nuzzi, a co-sponsor of the town’s resolution to commence litigation against the County in 2009, said. “As no action has been taken with the exception of the trailer being moved a few hundred yards in Westhampton, the town has no choice but to continue to compel the county to finally take the action promised.”
Councilwoman Bridget Fleming said the decision sets a bad precedent "and will only result in increased litigation costs to be shouldered by the taxpayers."
The Town Board, said Councilman Jim Malone, has authorized the town attorney's office to take "whatever steps are necessary to overturn this misguided decision. Southampton Town residents have been shouldering a disproportionate share of this housing concern for far too long and it's time for the county to honor its promises to share this burden across all ten towns, not just Southampton."
Bellone did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Jumat, 21 September 2012
MO - Former St. Louis County Police officer (Cedric Webb) pleads guilty to 1999 teen sex crimes
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| Cedric Webb |
09/21/2012
By Dave Keiser
Clayton (KSDK) - A former St. Louis County Police officer has pleaded guilty to three statutory sodomy charges stemming from an inappropriate sexual relationship he had with an underage teenage girl in 1999.
In exchange for the plea, 44 year old Cedric Webb of unincorporated north St. Louis County was ordered to serve 160 days in the county jail, and two suspended five year prison terms for the crimes.
Webb was also placed on supervised probation for the next five years.
Investigators brought their case to prosecutors earlier this year after the victim noticed Webb while she was running errands and felt the need to report to police what had occurred more than a decade earlier.
WI - Lawmakers consider changes to sex predator law
09/21/2012
By Gilman Halsted
A legislative council committee is considering changes to the state's sex predator law. The committee heard testimony from prosecutors and defense attorneys at a hearing in Madison Wednesday.
The committee is trying to tweak the law, while still protecting both public safety and the rights of an offender to be released someday. Milwaukee County prosecutor Holly Bunch told the committee there is a problem with the new risk assessment tool used. She says it is making it much easier for people who have been committed as predators under Chapter 980 to be released without supervision, even if they refuse to accept treatment while they are confined. "This has been most disturbing to me in cases where a person has been a treatment refuser, has sat there doing nothing, when the whole point of Chapter 980 is treatment, and then somehow gets rewarded for a change in the science. My perspective is that leopards just don't generally change their spots."
A defense attorney who represents people committed under the sex predator law disagrees. Vincent Rust works in the La Crosse public defender’s office. He said, "What she's [Bunch’s] saying is that the risk continues over a life span. Well, I think in a way it's just common sense. I don't think that we need to test it. If a guy commits a rape when he's 25, he's going to be less risky when he's 60, and that's what the empirical studies show."
Rust agrees with prosecutors that the law is not treating people fairly now. He says there needs to be more of an incentive for offenders to accept treatment both in the institution and in the community once they are released. The committee plans to propose changes to the law next year.
GA - Ex-deputy (Christopher Thomas Davis) admits to taking sexual photos of 6-year-old girl left in his care
09/20/2012
By Kimathi Lewis
Being in the custody of a sheriff’s deputy should have been the safest place for a 6-year-old child.
But Mr. Christopher Thomas Davis abused the girl's trust by taking sexually explicit photographs of her to add to his vast collection of images of children being sexually abused.
And on Tuesday, the former White County Sheriff’s deputy pleaded guilty to producing child pornography that involved the 6-year-old, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office.
A judge will decide the penalty for his crime on Nov. 27, prosecutors said.
“This defendant committed the ultimate act of betrayal,” U.S. Attorney Mrs. Sally Quillian Yates said.
“He violated the trust of the 6-year old victim, who he was charged with protecting, and betrayed the trust of his community by committing this heinous act while employed as sworn law enforcement officer.”
Investigators said between May 18 and June 25, 2009, Mr. Davis took photographs of a 6-year-old girl in his custody while she engaged in sexually explicit conduct.
The photographs were taken inside Mr. Davis's Dahlonega home, according to court records.
On Aug. 25, 2011, federal agents executed a search warrant at the deputy’s home where they found several hundred additional images of child pornography on an external hard drive and on a laptop computer, prosecutors said.
Mr. Davis, 32, faces a maximum sentence of up to 30 years in prison, a fine of up to $250,000 and the rest of his life on supervised release.
Also, he will be required to register as a sex offender once he’s released from prison, prosecutors said.
TX - Ex-cop (Charles Leroy Earl) gets 30 years for massive child porn stash
09/20/2012
By Guillermo Contreras
A former police officer who served 12 years for molesting a child was sentenced Thursday to another 30 years in federal prison for a child-pornography stash so large that agents had to stop counting the images.
Charles Leroy Earl, 65, was a police officer in Reno, Nev., for nine years until he was convicted there in 1985 of sexually assaulting a 13-year-old, one of three teens he was accused at the time of sexually assaulting.
Earl moved to Texas after his release from a Nevada prison and was living in New Braunfels, working as a self-employed computer systems administrator.
He didn't register as a sex offender when he moved to Texas.
On Oct. 4, 2011, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents working on a national child-porn sweep raided his New Braunfels home and seized 10 computers, eight powerbooks, 61 hard drives, two digital cameras, and numerous compact disks and DVDs.
Investigators found a huge cache of child-porn images, but agents were told to stop counting because they already had amassed the evidence they needed and had to work on other cases that were backing up.
“It was enormous,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Tracy Thompson said of the collection.
When Earl was first interviewed, “he admitted to the agents that they would find hundreds of thousands of child porn images. ... It's the largest amount that homeland security agents have ever seen in” South Texas.
His lawyer sought leniency, and Earl told the judge he wanted to teach others about computers.
Besides giving Earl the 30-year, no-parole sentence, U.S. District Judge Orlando Garcia also ordered him to serve a lifetime of supervision if he gets out of prison.
Kamis, 20 September 2012
MN - Court Rules That Student’s Facebook Messages are Protected Under First and Fourth Amendments
But when the state, county or police ask an ex-sex offender for their online ID's and passwords, it's all of a sudden constitutional?
09/19/2012
Earlier this month, a U.S. District Court in Minnesota ruled that a student’s online privacy is protected under the first and fourth amendments, and any school officials who require the disclosure of a student’s password is violating their privacy rights. The case concerns a 12-year-old in Minnesota who wrote negative remarks about an employee at her school on her Facebook page. She was disciplined by the school for her posts, and the school forced her to hand over the passwords to her Facebook and personal email pages.
According to the Wall Street Journal, the court ruled that statements made away from school “are protected under the First Amendment and not punishable by school authorities unless they are true threats or are reasonably calculated to reach the school environment and are so egregious as to pose a serious safety risk or other substantial disruption in that environment.”
The ruling has been hailed by experts as a promising first step in guaranteeing privacy rights for online content.
“Public schools that require any of their students to register their social media usernames, or to provide access to their password protected digital content via required Facebook Friending or the installation of a third-party software application for any reason are in clear violation of the 1st and 4th Amendment,” wrote Bradley Shear, an attorney who has helped states deal with issues of privacy and social media.
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